By Dr. Tess Breen, Organizational Psychologist

Key takeaway: Team performance in 2026 hinges less on team structure or hybrid policy and more on what managers do every week. Gallup’s latest data shows that 70% of the variance in team engagement traces back to the manager, and meta-analytic evidence puts intrateam trust as a stronger predictor of performance than most leaders realize. The fastest way to lift a team’s output isn’t a new tool or a reorg. It’s a manager who can build trust, name the goal, and clear obstacles.

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report landed with a number that should worry anyone running a team. Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, matching the lowest point on record since the early pandemic. The drop cost the global economy an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity in a single year. Manager engagement fell harder, from 30% to 27%, with the steepest declines among young managers and women.

That manager number matters more than the headline. In my work with executive teams, I keep seeing the same pattern: when senior leaders ask why a team is stalling, they look first at strategy, then at structure, then at people. The variable they keep missing is the manager’s daily behavior. And Gallup has measured this for decades. 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager, not the team composition, not the office policy, not the comp plan.

What Actually Separates High-Performing Teams

The strongest evidence we have on what makes teams perform comes from a meta-analysis by De Jong, Dirks, and Gillespie published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2016. They synthesized 112 independent studies covering 7,763 teams. The headline finding: intrateam trust correlates with team performance at ρ = .30, which is a large effect in organizational research. The link holds across both cognitive trust (I can rely on your competence) and affective trust (I believe you have my back). It strengthens when work is highly interdependent, which is to say, exactly the conditions most knowledge teams operate in today.

Amy Edmondson’s body of work on psychological safety extends this picture. Her 2019 book and accompanying research in Administrative Science Quarterly demonstrate that teams who can voice concerns, admit mistakes, and challenge each other without fear consistently outperform teams who cannot. A 2023 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology found psychologically safe teams produce 27% more innovation output than their peers.

Add the Gallup 2025 finding that high-performing teams show 41% better engagement and 38% better performance than poorly coordinated ones, and the picture sharpens. Performance isn’t randomly distributed. It tracks closely with two managerial outputs: a climate where people trust each other, and a climate where it’s safe to speak up.

Three Practices That Move the Needle

After two decades of coaching managers, here’s what I find consistently moves teams from average to high-performing.

Weekly one-on-ones that aren’t status updates. Most one-on-ones become reporting meetings. The manager hears what was done; the report leaves with a task list. High-performing managers use that time differently. They ask what’s blocking the work, what the report is uncertain about, and what they need that they haven’t asked for. The signal sent is: I will protect your time and your judgment.

Goal clarity at the team level, every quarter. Gallup’s 2025 data shows only 41% of employees feel their work aligns with their organization’s mission. That gap is filled by the manager. A useful exercise: ask each team member privately to write down the team’s three most important goals this quarter. If the answers disagree, you don’t have a goal problem, you have a translation problem. Fix it before adding new work.

Naming what you see, fast. Teams with high trust have managers who name the dynamic when it shifts. If two people are clearly avoiding each other, the manager surfaces it. If the team is gossiping about a peer, the manager interrupts the pattern. Edmondson calls this “leader inclusiveness.” It signals that the manager will not let small fractures harden.

Where Most Teams Get Stuck

The trap I see most often is what I call “performative engagement.” Managers run engagement surveys, hold offsites, send recognition messages, but never change the underlying conditions that drive how the team actually functions. Recognition is the most underused tool in this category. Gallup reports that only 26% of employees say they get adequate recognition, even in companies that run formal programs. The fix isn’t more awards. It’s specific, timely, private acknowledgment from the manager that lands in the moment a person stretches.

Hybrid teams compound the problem. Recent collaboration research finds remote miscommunication occurs roughly 40% more often than in-person, and Agile-team studies from 2025 show that meeting participation skews toward whoever is physically in the room. The discipline of hybrid management is making the implicit explicit: writing decisions down, rotating facilitation, and giving remote members structured airtime.

The Bottom Line

If you lead a team that’s underperforming relative to what you know it can do, the highest-leverage place to look is your own weekly behavior. Strategy and structure matter, but the research keeps telling us the same thing: teams move when managers build trust, clarify the work, and protect the conditions for honest conversation. Everything else is downstream.

If you want help auditing how your leaders are showing up for their teams, or designing a leadership development program built on this evidence base, I’d love to talk. Schedule a consultation.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much of team performance is really driven by the manager?

Gallup’s longitudinal research finds that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement, which is the strongest near-term predictor of team performance. That makes the manager the highest-leverage variable in most performance conversations.

What’s the difference between trust and psychological safety on a team?

Trust is interpersonal: I rely on you, individual to individual. Psychological safety is climate-level: this team is safe to take interpersonal risks in. You can have high one-to-one trust and still have low team-level psychological safety, which is why both have to be cultivated.

How long does it take to shift a team’s performance?

In my experience, measurable shifts in team climate take 8 to 12 weeks of consistent managerial behavior change. Performance metrics follow climate by about a quarter. There’s no fast fix, but the slope changes quickly once a manager commits to the work.

Are hybrid teams inherently lower-performing?

No, the research is clear that hybrid teams can outperform fully onsite peers when managers structure work around outcomes, not hours, and make collaboration explicit. The risk isn’t the model; it’s untrained managers running the model on autopilot.

What’s the single highest-leverage practice for a new manager?

The weekly one-on-one. Done well, it builds trust, surfaces blockers, and clarifies priorities every seven days. Done poorly, it becomes a status meeting that erodes the relationship. The questions you ask matter more than the time you spend.

Sources

• De Jong, B. A., Dirks, K. T., & Gillespie, N. (2016). Trust and team performance: A meta-analysis of main effects, moderators, and covariates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1134-1150. PubMed
• Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
• Gallup. (2025). State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report. Gallup